from the a-little-perspective dept

Music predates agriculture. That's something I suppose I always knew, but had never thought about in such clear terms until Bryan Kim illustrated it in a talk at SFMusicTech with a photo of a 35,000-year-old bone flute. This places music before farming and written language on the timeline of humanity, right alongside the earliest known cave paintings in Europe, at the very least. By comparison, recorded music has only been around for a little over a century.

Viewed in that light, the idea that recordings are the central, defining aspect of music or the music industry is just plain ridiculous. Between that ancient flute and today, there have been plenty of different successful models for funding music. Kim points out that the one common thread throughout, which continues today, is that music's primary function is more community-building than anything else:

For most of human history, music was a public and participatory experience, inextricably linked to a plural of people synched in a real-time experience. As a binding agent of dancing and singing bodies, music could literally manifest community. And lest you think our modern society has evolved beyond the tribal utility of music, just think of religious services, major sporting events, weddings, nightclubs, road trips… when was the last time you attended one of these without some sort of collective music ritual?

...

In many ways, music is the original social network. This makes musicians founders of community. In a networked world, that’s powerful.

I found all this especially fascinating because of the conclusion Kim reached, and the model he's dubbed "crowd patronage" for supporting music going forward, combining the traditions of busking and of wealthy patrons that have been dominant in virtually all periods of history and, likely, pre-history. The idea is that you need an "ecosystem of fans" and then they will support you in exchange for "relationship access". It is, essentially, the same as what we've been calling CwF+RtB here at Techdirt. Using Kickstarter as an example, Kim elaborates:

Just like in the era of patronage, pledgers are usually not buying a commodified product. The most successful music Kickstarter projects sell you one or more of three “values”: 1) access to artist (as discussed above), 2) exclusivity and 3) recognition/participation (especially for artist’s creation).

So we’re going to see more artists open up the creation process to their fanbase. Everything from crediting fans in the liner notes, to tracking fans' recorded sounds as real stems, to skyping and polling fans during studio sessions.

As a musician, it’s already technically possible to do this. In the next few years, we’re going to find it become more culturally acceptable on both the artist and fan side. More importantly, artists are going to start finding which sorts of packages their fans actually buy, etching out the contours of a new crowd patronage “model”.

It's great to see more people reaching this conclusion, and especially interesting to see it approached from a broader historical perspective: crowd patronage or CwF+RtB is only a new or radical concept when viewed through the narrow lens of recorded music's few decades of dominance. In the bigger picture, it's actually a return to music's roots as a community tool and a tribal experience. Recorded music is still a fantastic thing that has enriched our lives and our culture in its own way—but the notion that music cannot thrive without the commoditization of discrete units doesn't withstand an ounce of scrutiny. The next time someone suggests such a thing, remind them that humans were carving flutes out of bone 20,000 years before the last ice age ended, when glaciers were still creeping towards the Great Lakes and consuming all of the British Isles, and the last few Neanderthals were still roaming around Europe. It sure makes CDs and records seem a tad less significant.

from the alternatives-arise dept

We've certainly talked about the massive growth of Kickstarter, especially in the movie space, and apparently that's being noticed at famous movie festivals like Sundance. David Carr has an article at the NY Times, in which he compares Kickstarter to a movie studio but without the arrogance of a studio. And, of course, it is a very different proposition. Unlike in a studio relationship, the artist retains the ownership of the work. Unlike in a studio relationship, there's no one at Kickstarter who has to "greenlight" the picture to get it made. Instead, it's entirely tied to the ability of filmmakers to get people to pay up (in small bunches) to make it work. And it does seem to be working:

[Kickstarter] had helped finance 10 percent of the festival's slate, 17 movies in all, including four that were in competition.

And did it all without the obnoxiousness of a tradtional Hollywood studio/distributor. Of course, this really highlights a point that we've been making for over a decade. While some traditionalists with little vision have spent the last decade screaming about how there are no new business models for producing content, it's become increasingly clear that where there's a need, such services and business models will get created. And, even better, they seem to be ones set up in a way where the artist has more choice and more control.

from the connecting-with-fans... dept

A bunch of folks have sent over this story of how the author of the popular book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller, had been working for years on turning the book into a movie, but in the middle of September, he posted to his website that it just wasn't going to happen, because the traditional funders of movies weren't interested in the movie. The book apparently is a sort of coming of age, semi-autobiographical story, involving aspects of the author's spiritual/religious journey. As Miller explained, while the book is a "Christian" book, it has elements in it that those who traditionally fund "Christian movies" didn't want to support (for example, something involving putting a giant condom on a church steeple...). And he suggested that, while the book has found an audience among students going through similar situations, those are not the people who generally fund movies.

Or, perhaps they are. Miller had been able to bring together some funding, but came up $125,000 short of what was needed for the indie film production (including some well-known actors). After saying that the project was dead, some fans apparently stepped up and suggested he try to raise the missing $125,000 on Kickstarter. In the course of about a month, not only did they hit the $125,000 mark in just one week, but fans of the book continued contributing to the cause, leading them to bring in $346,000 by the time the project closed.

That's a rather stunning amount. Prior to this, I believe the largest Kickstarter project had been the famous Diaspora distributed social networking project that got tons of press for breaking $100,000. Of course, no one is suggesting that this is the way to fund all films or that this will work in every case (we've certainly seen Kickstarter projects fail at times). However, it's yet another example of how really committed and engaged fans can make things happen where the old gatekeepers stood in the way.

from the connecting-with-anti-fans? dept

There are so many "fan-funding" platforms, like Kickstarter, out there that involve trying to raise a certain amount via a bunch of fan pledges, where they only have to pay if they reach the goal. Usually, we see projects on those sites used for things like funding a new album or a book or something. But what about an anti- funding project? Hypebot points us to the fact that some "fans" (and perhaps I should use that word loosely) of the band Weezer are using one of those platforms to try to raise $10 million dollars to get the band Weezer to break up. The organizer is apparently upset that the band doesn't make good albums any more:

I have never been a fan of this band. I think that they are pretty much horrible, and always have been. Even in the early 90's.

But this isn't about me. This is about the Weezer fans. They are our brothers and sisters, our friends, our lovers.

Every year, Rivers Cuomo swears that he's changed, and that their new album is the best thing that he's done since "Pinkerton," and what happens? Another pile of crap like "Beverly Hills" or "I'm Your Daddy."

This is an abusive relationship, and it needs to stop now.

I am tired of my friends being disappointed year after year.

I am tired of endless whimsical cutesy album covers and music videos.

I'm sick of hearing about whatever this terrible (and yes, even if you like the early stuff, you should be able to admit that they are wretched now) excuse for a band is up to these days.

If all 852,000 of you (really?) who bought "Pinkerton" pitch in $12, we will meet our al.

Nicely done. Of course, now that it's gotten attention, the guy who originally posted it is taking it down, saying that he did it (of course) for the lulz (as if anyone thought he was serious?). Anyway, perhaps we should have tried this for our $100 million offer to have us silence Techdirt.

from the just-think-what-comes-next dept

I had another story planned for our new "case studies" series (see last week's if you missed it), but with the release of Sintel late last week, it jumped the queue, and I put together this quick case study

For years, one of the points we've raised in answering the movie industry's $200 million challenge to us (i.e., "how do you keep making $200 million movies?") is that, in part, it's asking the wrong question. No one asks "how do we keep making $10,000 computers?" Instead, they look for ways to make them cheaper (and better, at the same time). But in the world of Hollywood accounting, there's little incentive to make cheaper movies (sometimes the incentive goes the other way). And, we keep showing how the world is reaching a place where it's cheaper and cheaper to make good movies. We've pointed out nice examples of people making high quality movies for next to nothing. The idea is not that movies should be made for nothing, but that the technology is making it so that movies can be made for less. In fact, with two of the examples of cheap movie making we've highlighted, the makers later went on to score deals to do higher end movies for more reasonable budgets.

There are so many important points to make here that relate to stuff we talk about:

The technology keeps getting better and the cost to do such high quality work keeps decreasing. This movie did cost $550,000 to make -- involving a 14-person team. But, that's a hell of a lot less than it would have cost not so long ago for anything of this level of quality.

The creators used some crowdfunding: They offered up a bunch of reasons to buy as a way to get people to preorder and pay up front. Note that they didn't just say "please give us money," but provided a bunch of benefits for doing so.

The release is totally open source: They're using a Creative Commons license that only requires attribution. That is, they have no problem with commercial uses.

The movie itself is also promoting something else: The movie comes from the Blender Foundation, and helps promote their open source 3D content creation suite, which is helpful for their business. This is a point that we've tried to make many times in the past. All content advertises something, and it's often important to figure out what that is. In this case, Sintel helps "advertise" Blender's tools. It's yet another example of content as advertising, and doing so in a way that's not intrusive or seen as "product placement." If you have content, it's important to realize what that content is advertising.

Definitely a cool example of a variety of neat ideas all wrapped up into one... and producing a great movie as well.

from the these-things-evolve dept

Four years ago, we wrote about the amazing quality of Star Wreck, a fan-created Star Trek spoof that was created on effectively no budget, for fun, but which had stunningly good special effects (especially for no budget). We pointed this out not to say the future of film was such fan labors of love, but to note that the claims that professional movies needed $200 million budgets to create amazing special effects was a myth. However, we've had a few Hollywood insiders use this particular story time and time again to falsely suggest that we claimed that Star Wreck represented the future of the movie business.

But, what's interesting is what's happened since Star Wreck. As we noted last year the filmmakers behind Star Wreck have been busy at work on their latest project, called Iron Sky, and they were experimenting with a sort of hybrid funding model that included a fair amount of fan support, whereby fans could buy "War Bonds" to crowdfund a portion of the movie.

Wired is now reporting that the film has raised 90% of its $8.5 million budget, and they're close enough that plans are moving forward to get the movie production underway. Again, this particular effort was a hybrid. Part of the money is fan funded and part of it involves traditional movie investors.

But what's most interesting to me is how this story progressed. It went from some fans messing around and creating a rather impressive film visually speaking, to a new $8.5 million production. $8.5M is still a small amount from a movie-making perspective, but it's not nothing. Plenty of excellent indie films have been made for a lot less. And, of course, you never know what happens next, after this film is made as well. And that was really the point. It was never that the model that created Star Wreck was the answer, but that the overall ecosystem is evolving, and its evolving to a world where the fans and the community really area a part of things, rather than looked at as evil people who just want stuff for free. Embracing your community leads to wonderful possibilities.

from the too-bad,-but... dept

With the news that SellaBand has filed for bankruptcy, we've been seeing some gloating among those who don't believe in direct-to-fan or fan-supported business models for music -- suggesting that Sellaband's failure is an indication that those models don't work. Of course, that's kind of like arguing that the personal computer industry is a failure because Osborne went out of business. Sellaband wasn't the first in the market, but certainly was a pioneer in promoting fan-focused business models. But a lot of Sellaband's troubles came down not to the model, but to actual execution. Every time we'd post about Sellaband, we'd receive a bunch of emails and comments from people who had really bad experiences working with the company.

Unlike the more recent crop of companies in this space, that appear to be a lot more flexible, Sellaband was pretty rigid in its setup. Rather than designing itself as a platform for fan funding, it tried to position itself as a label that also used fan funding -- but that required doing a lot of stuff that labels help with, and one of the complaints with Sellaband was that it wasn't well setup to handle much of that. Separately, unlike other fan funding options, Sellaband used to require a band to raise $50,000 -- which is a lot more than many bands might need. Eventually this changed, but it made things slow going for Sellaband. Furthermore, one of the bigger problems with Sellaband was that it didn't quite have the model right. It did very little to encourage actual connecting with fans, and never did a really good job setting things up so fans had a good reason to buy. Sellaband seemed to assume that people would just support a band for an "investment" in their album. But that mucked up the fan relationship a bit. Fans support a band because they want quality product (music, experience, access) back, not potential monetary returns.

The failure of Sellaband is a failure of execution, but certainly not of the idea that you can create models that allow content creators to build business models by getting fans to support them via more creative business models.